Dell has taken the wraps off a new suite of software products, based on its recent acquisitions of Quest, KACE, SonicWALL, AppAssure and Boomi.

By
Sophie Curtis
| Dec 14, 2012

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Dell has taken the wraps off a new suite of software products, based on its recent acquisitions of Quest, KACE, SonicWALL, AppAssure and Boomi.

The most prominent announcement is CIO Powerboard, which aims to give CIOs an end-to-end view of their IT environments, including applications and user experience, networking elements, PC assets and software, and services and managed resources.

The CIO Powerboard management console integrates solutions from Quest, KACE, SonicWALL and AppAssure, all brought together by Dell Boomi. Dell claims that it will help organisations improve the integrity of data across their systems.

For example, a network security appliance like SonicWALL Next Generation Firewall can provide application usage and access data while a systems management tool like KACE K1000 can provide information about users and systems that are accessing the application.

Meanwhile, AppAssure’s backup and recovery system can provide the status of backup and recovery resources used to deliver the application, while Quest Foglight can provide performance information about the same application.

“If a system is unresponsive, we need to understand when it started and why, in order to quickly engage the right IT skill in order to resolve the issue,” said Carol Fawcett, CIO of Dell Software.

“While you might have noticed that we've been actively assembling lots of new technology with a number of acquisitions, behind the scenes we've been integrating these into powerful and practical solutions,” said Dell founder at CEO Michael Dell.

In an interview with Techworld at the Dell World conference in Texas, Rob Meinhardt, founder and general manager of Dell KACE, said that the launch of CIO Powerboard represents the “low-hanging fruit” in terms of integrating Dell's software assets.

“There's some other more sophisticated things you could do over time. For example, could you take a KACE appliance and use it to manage SonicWALL firewalls? SonicWALL firewall customers like to manage their devices too, so why should we have a whole bunch of management consoles? Could we have one thing?” he said.

“I'm not saying it would be necessarily KACE as the centre point in every instance, but we have the opportunity to bring functionality together.”